


cold bed

by saturno



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Disgusting Descriptions, Fear of Death, Gorn, Graphic Description of Corpses, Gross, Guro, Lowercase, M/M, Mental Instability, Mutilation, Necrophilia, Psychological Trauma, Sexist Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 14:44:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2273670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturno/pseuds/saturno
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>waylon in a locker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cold bed

**Author's Note:**

> the title is a [swans track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7WCuPEOK9U)

the space all around him in the locker is pitch black, so opaque and dense that waylon's eyes are open as wide as they'll go, trying to take in any light possible. finding nothing. blind. his heart is a caged feral animal in his chest, wriggling and kicking and terrified against the backside of his sternum. blood and adrenaline twisting, shooting through his body. the fear burns most of all, gnawing at the lining of his stomach, knotting in his throat, freezing sweat and knock-kneed and beating hotly in his broken leg in time with his pulse. he is a little boy in his childhood bedroom again, hiding, curled tight under his bed sheets. holding his breath so the bogeyman won't hear.

the smell of decomposition is unreal. overwhelming. he can taste it when he breathes, a palpable humid fog of spoiling meat and shit and overflowing bacteria all around him. he had opened the locker next to the one he was in now and a dead man was inside, a man with a black burlap sack over his face and who had been cut open down the center, from breastbone to where his missing cock should have been. a long, angry, gaping hole crudely stitched half shut and a second person's head resting inside of it, sewn up within his swollen gut, staring out into space with cloudy, dry eyes and a blank, bloated look on his face. (that's the, the baby, it's supposed to be the fucking baby,) like he was softly confused about something. waylon can smell the two of them now, hiding at the bottom of his locker, his new little home, can smell them just next door. the stench is overpowering. buttery and greasy and thick. creamy muscle slough and liquefying fat. sticking to the inside of his nose, to his hair, leeching into his clothes. his stomach is seizing, rippling, the back of his throat contracting in swallow after swallow, watering, but he holds the urge to vomit in. holds it in. has to.  
can't make a sound.  
can't let him hear.

waylon's camera is open in his lap and is out of batteries, and his mind spins in an adrenal gland circle with the panic just behind him, nibbling at his heels, then biting into his calves. dragging him to the floor. he won't be able to get out of the locker fast enough on his broken leg. he's going to die here. here in the dark with his two dead friends in the next locker. he'll be found. he'll be cut. cut open and mutilated, gutted like an animal and dishrags stuffed into gouges made in his chest and someone else's fucking head sewed up into his body, because that's what the, what the man does, that's what waylon's found in the dead man after dead man he's stumbled into and tripped over in the dark. that's what he does. that's what he's going to do. waylon can see a sickening vision of himself dead, open eyes staring into the black insides of a canvas bag around his face and someone's goddamn fucking head gazing out blankly from his new home in his guts, dead and decomposing, melting down into food and first insects and then rats swarming in his abdomen and picking and gnawing the meat out from between his ribs and inside his skull and he has to stop, he's panicking, he's going to be sick, his vision is swimming in the dark and he has to stop. has to stop. stop. stomach and heart and intestines leaping into his throat and balling up tight in sheer silent mortal terror.

silent. dead silent. because waylon can hear him coming into the room.

soft, barely there footsteps like he's floating in on a cloud of incessant humming, whistling, muttering. atonal singing. but waylon can recognize it. harry von fucking tilzer. waylon's grandmother had owned this record, had played it for him when he was a boy, sitting in the kitchen with apple juice and graham crackers and hearing it drift through her house. the panicking pieces of him are that little boy again, crunched down at the bottom of the locker. some hysterical train of thought pretends that he is 7 years old and hiding in a closet, that he and grandma are playing hide and seek, but the smell of rot is forcing down into him like a solid dripping mass, grabbing on to something deep in his head, ripping him back square into reality. the smell and the sound of the singing man's voice, like he's purring, lisping, can't force his mouth into the shapes of the words.

waylon had gotten one good look at the man's face through the viewfinder of his camera, seen the splattered sinewy knots of cancers twisting through his face (and down into the bone below, and down into the brain, down like stalactites, oh jesus, fucking, jesus christ) and knotting the flesh tight. one of his eyes was peeled back and open wider than the other, stretched apart like it was permanently stupefied about something only he could see. tight like burns, contracted and prying the skin on his face back, back. can't control the shapes his mouth makes and his speech is slurring, oozing soft and silky out from behind necrotic growths.  
waylon can imagine that face clearly in his mind's eye now, can see it twisted and smiling like it's going to bite his throat open. there are footsteps, quiet footsteps, in the room. it's a storage area and it's fucking small, two lockers and a few sets of shelves and nothing else. nothing else. he saw waylon come in here. he knows he's in here. the steps are coming closer to waylon's locker, quiet like the way the man's voice is dropping down into a soft baritone whisper, lower, softer. humming indistinctly. like he's taking his time.

every muscle in waylon's body is locked solid, rigid, hard stone, and the pain in his leg is so bad and the fear is so great and so consuming that something in him knows he will not be able to run if the door to his locker opens. he doesn't breathe. he doesn't blink. his heart is so loud in his ears he can barely hear the footsteps, and he's terrified then that somehow the man is going to hear his heart, that he can hear it now, can hear it pounding and echoing out from the locker and filling the room and now he's zeroing in, closer, he's inches in front of the door and he's gonna die, waylon's gonna die, gonna die, no way out, gonna die, die, he'll die, he can see lisa, in his head, visions, flickering memories, lisa and his boys, his, his family, lisa, his, he'll die, he's gonna,  
die,

  
and,

  
when the BANG of the cheap metal door flinging open shrieks through the air waylon's insides JOLT but his body cannot move, does not move, - it isn't his door that opened. the man, the thing outside, the groom had torn opened the locker next to him, the locker with the two dead men inside and the way he'd ripped the door open so violently has jostled them, shaken them out from the small space they'd been stuffed into. waylon can feel it through the thin metal wall of the locker as the men crash against the door and tumble out, the heavy thud as they fall face first into the groom, his harsh breath as they land on him. fuck. not waylon's locker. fuck. he could've died. it could've, that could've been it. fuck. fuck. he's breathless.  
he can hear the man shifting minutely. then still. solid, thick mass. unmoving. he caught them? he caught them. there's a scraping of legs dragging a few inches across the floor, a sound like wheezing. noises. like the man outside is confused by this. like he doesn't know where to place this event in his fucking insane looping narrative.  
for one or two moments. before something in his tumor riddled brain wetly clicks into place.

then,  
" _o_ hh," waylon hears the thing coo, soft, gently in a voice like he is awestruck, moved by a vision of something holy, "my, o _h_ , myy,  
"d _ar_ rli _n_ g..." he exhales in a ghoulish mr. ed trill and there is a CRACK suddenly against the front of the other locker, the sound of the groom leaning back, shoulder-first into it. a sound that makes waylon JUMP backwards and strike the back of his head against the metal behind him. but it's a noise the man outside somehow doesn't hear.

"yyou came back.

"i thought i'd losst you.

"i thought you'd run away from me. like all the others. runn, with our b _vavy_."  
audible swallowing.  
"but yyou're here. you're right here."  
something in his voice is quivering. straining. cracking.

'darling. darling.' a mantra. the man's voice is muffled, like he's pressing his mouth into the body's mass somewhere, and waylon can very clearly, suddenly, envision the groom's gnarled lips crushed in along their throat. jesus christ. freed from the confines of the other locker, the smell of death is twice as pungent, and waylon's clamping his hands down hard in front of his face and breathing shallowly, frantically, in the tight gap, trying to block the stench out with the smell of the dirt on his palms, the smell of his own skin. the smell of anything. anything else. this isn't happening. jesus fucking christ no. this isn't happening. the groom is shuffling against something, scraping down the side of the locker, down, until waylon hears him on the floor, sitting against the other locker's door. with the body.

"you're sso b _ **v** ve_aut _h_ ifull lik _e_ e this," his raw voice floats, wheezes through the darkness in a way that makes every hair along waylon's body stand on end, it's throaty and low and flushed and waylon's stomach feels like it's dropping through his guts and exploding against the floor. no. no. (oh my god. oh god almighty.) not happening. this isn't happening. waylon's brain flashes back immediately to the man he'd seen behind a locked gate with his crusted filthy pants yanked down under his ass, stroking himself frantically and gasping, shamelessly, standing right over a pile of bodies so mashed and mutilated that parts had looked like ground meat.

( _and then the gate wasn't locked at all, and the variant was coming after him, the variant was right behind him, tongue lolling out of his mouth and screaming and his dick still hard and straining against his pants and his hands clawing for him, any piece of him, the collar of his shirt, a grip on his hair, anything, tasty, tasty little bitch-_ )

there's the sound of fumbling clothes, clumsy fingers and soft grunts. ragged breathing. the blackness is a fucking nightmare, only encourages waylon's shrieking imagination to fill in the blanks and what he sees in his head makes him want to die. something jostles outside and the dead men hit against the locker and it unleashes new smells, fresh clouds of decomp up from the depths of their flowering bodies. waylon's heart is going faster than it ever has in his life and it's hurting, it's painful, his chest is burning, warm oozing hysteria flowing through his core and out through his limbs, swirling tight in the swollen-over muscle atop his cracked tibia. his hands fly from his face and CRUSH down against either side of his head with his dirty fingers scrabbling inside of his ears because the groom had started moving and had made a _noise_ and he doesn't want to hear this, he can't listen to this, he can't listen to what he's about to do to them. no. no.

he can see a vision of the rotting face in the guy's stomach staring out, blank and quiet still, like he's decided to be stoic and accepting of the inevitable. oh christ. oh jesus. he wants to turn his brain off so badly but the smell is everywhere like a physical force keeping him grounded in reality, keeping his heart rate sky high and climbing into the fucking sun. his locker is (no, _NO,_ ) lurching suddenly, the weight of the bodies outside shifting again, pressing against the lockers, bumping into the front of waylon's door and waylon wants to go paper flat against the wall behind him. his fingers in his ears aren't helping. aren't blocking out the noises the man is making, needly little ragged grunts and wordless clenched hissing like he's clamping his jaw down hard, grinding his teeth. or biting. someone, something.

"d **rrrhhrlln** n **n** _g_ ggg," the thing outside is gurgling through fluid, spewing, moaning wetly, and through the terror waylon is baffled, thinks the man outside is drooling - until he breathes in and then all at once understands that the bride figure has ruptured somehow, something in them coming apart and spilling, fermenting blood and human sludge. it's soaking into everything movable outside and then the thing's movements are very clear, accentuated and amplified by the liquid draining all over him, hard rhythmic squelching and the cartilage-cracking tearing of flaccid dead muscle.  
"dr **rRHRR _R_** _L **NG**_ G," louder, angrier, "D ** _DHHAR_ R**, **LLHN _NGGGG_ G**," and there is a heavy sledge **THUD** then, like a hammer coming down on something hollow, on one of their skulls, one of the dead men's skulls under his fist - waylon hears it again, and he can see very clearly in his mind the groom crunched over the bodies and rearing back and punching, can see the look on his face, fury and barely human and twisted up tight. every last ugly drop of misplaced rage sopped up into the spongy tissue growths in his skull and in his skin.  
"ug **gl** y  **fFhCKKING W _HHORE_** ," it drips in a guttural clenched-teeth _snarl,_ ripping out of his throat and the CRACKing of his fists coming down again against hard bone like a judge's gavel, like the smack of a guillotine cleaving through. again, again. the sound exploding out and filling the locker in time with the movements of the man's huge body.  
" **WANNA** _ **LEAVVE**_? THHI _N_ K YOU GETT TO F ** _U_ CKING  _LEAVVE_**??"  
waylon is absolutely paralyzed. his entire body convulses in feverish shakes, like he's seizing, and all he can see is lisa, lisa gripping his hand tight through the pain of their children's births, lisa five years younger and asleep in his bed and then two weeks ago a few days before he left to come to work here and her eyelashes resting against her cheeks as she dozed on the couch with an episode of modern family still playing on the tv,

" _dhon't leav_ e," the thing is warbling from just outside, less than a foot away, cracking through the walls in waylon's dissociative fantasy, his voice clenching and straining and vacillating between the screaming anger and the stretched-thin brink of tears and heavy ragged breathing. "yo _u can't leav_ e. you ca _n_ 't go. yo _u can't_ l _eave_ me." the sounds are still there, of him (no) fucking the (no, no) body, he, waylon doesn't want to listen and his fingers are digging deeper against his ears, eyes slamming shut like it'll help him not hear to not take in anything, screaming and screaming in his head trying to tune it out. he wants to puncture through his eardrums and deafen himself forever. anything to make it fucking stop. anything to make the reminder stop that this is what he's going to do to waylon if he finds him in here. this is what's going to happen to him if he makes one ( _throb of his broken leg_ ) single ( _throb, throb, throb_ ) mistake.

he's dead. he's dead and the groom is going to open him up and fuck his corpse and the thought of it crushes his stomach flat against the back of his chest and he is almost sick then, heaves but nothing comes out. frigid sweat all along his body. death is here. death is coming for him. death is savoring the putrefying projection of his mother or his past victim or his own self, breathing wordlessly and harsh like a machine as he fucks them and beats them again, continuously, constant, constant, until the strikes grow wetter and wetter with the skull cracking, cleaving, blooming, revealing its pink insides, all its soft empty thoughts. ripping sounds. the tearing of thick sinewy masses and the snapping of bone. he doesn't know what's happening outside his locker. he doesn't want to know. the man isn't talking anymore, only makes noises, erratic grunts and sighs and sounds of compressed anger, and with the silence of the body it all sounds like just one creature, a singular blind entity tearing itself to pieces and stretching out in a puddle of its own blood, writhing and crying out for something it can't find inside of itself.

waylon is with his boys in the hospital at each of their births.  
waylon is looking into their beautiful eyes, and he is overwhelmed by love.


End file.
